After Diana Ross, the singer celebrated for her golden stamp will embody in the cinema the mythical figure of jazz, Billie Holliday. An Oscar in perspective?
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Already celebrated for her golden stamp, soul singer Andra Day landed a Golden Globe nomination for her first film appearance. In Billie Holiday, a matter of state, she embodies the jazz legend, her lifelong idol, whose nickname, Lady Day, inspired her own stage name. As Oscar rumors swell, it’s time to make the introductions.
A worshiped musician
Its story looks like a fairy tale … In 2010, Andra Day, born Cassandra Batie, sang in a shopping center. The wife of Stevie Wonder goes through there and tells her husband about her discovery. From then on, everything is linked: the meeting with a producer, the first parts of Lenny Kravitz, an Apple commercial with the singer of Superstition and, above all, a first album, Cheers to the Fall (released in 2015), which earned him two Grammy nominations. Spike Lee and M. Night Shyamalan make music videos for him and music lovers go on fire, comparing the San Diego diva to Adele, Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday.
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In video, “Billie Holiday, a matter of state”, the trailer
A born actress
When Lee Daniels decides to direct Billie Holliday, a matter of state – unveiled on hulu.com on February 26 and hoped for in our theaters in the spring – he does not consider Andra Day for the role. She does not feel that she has an attack to succeed Diana Ross who, in 1972, already embodied the legend of jazz in cinema. But, from the first meeting, it is artistic love at first sight between the director (Precious, The Butler) and the 36-year-old musician, sensitive to the filmmaker’s approach: “Not many people understand it, but black stories have been intentionally suppressed and manipulated. It is now essential that black artists reclaim them. ” To embody the myth, this rebellious and flayed figure, Andra Day loses 18 kg, begins to smoke and transforms her voice. All dressed in Prada, she plunges into the 1940s, and tells the life and struggle of this civil rights activist, harassed by the FBI, who tried to silence her by playing on her drug addiction and infiltrating her surrounds an officer who became her lover.
Andra Day and Tyler James Williams in Billie Holiday, a matter of state.
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Takashi Seida
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A respected activist
In 1939, Billie Holiday condemns the lynching of blacks in segregationist America through her song Strange Fruit which, as the film goes, unleashes the fury of the state. Like her model, Andra Day is also committed with her title Rise Up, a hymn to dignity and resilience, in a country more fractured than ever, after four years of Trump governance. Already invited by Michelle Obama to sing her song at the White House in 2015, she took it over for the nomination of Joe Biden last January. A whole symbol of reconciliation and hope, carried by an artist whose voice has not finished resounding.
